Search Results

Some might like to fancy it up, call it a mobile home, but let’s be serious, it was a trailer.  None of those trailers had tires, they weren’t going anywhere, they weren’t mobile.   I was living in one and trust me, if I could have fired it up and driven off, there were times I would have.  The trailer park sat right off a four-lane road, heavily trafficked.  I had the fortune of being in Lot 1, right there roadside. At one time there had been a house next door, sitting on a narrow but extremely long tract of land.  Whenever they mowed their grass, it smelled of garlic and onions.  It would smell good until it didn’t.  It never occurred to me until years later that the smell was the result of that entire property being overtaken with chives, releasing their fragrance as they were cut down.  It probably seemed like a good idea at one point, a little patch of chives right outside your door.  Until the homeowners grew old and no longer had the patience to control those chives as they spread and spread.  The house was torn down and the lot sat empty for years.  I imagine a property sandwiched right between a trailer park and a “weekly rates available” motel wasn’t in high demand. I had a telescope when I lived in that trailer.  Big and complicated, nothing I would have bought for myself.  My ex-husband had gotten it for me, trying to throw expensive toys in my direction, showing off that he had money when I didn’t.  He meant well, knew I liked to sit outside and stare at the moon and stars.  The telescope ruined it.  It was too heavy, too many knobs and dials, a user manual thick as a dictionary.  I felt boxed in, opening myself to scrutiny if I dared sit outside and look at the moon.  “Why aren’t you using your telescope?” I anticipated being asked.  So, I just quit looking. Once, my daughter and I decided to walk to the nearest park, to go creek stomping.  Some might prefer to say crick, and they would be wrong.  I don’t know why we walked, maybe we didn’t have a car available.  It wasn’t terribly far, maybe ten blocks, but I can’t imagine we carried any provisions such as snacks or water.  I know we didn’t take spare pairs of shoes.  It had to have been warm out, the creek mostly in shade, I wouldn’t have wanted it to be too cool as we stomped through the mud and water. The water level was always unknown; would it be up to our ankles or up to our thighs? Would the creek bed be rocky, risking a twisted ankle or would we be trudging through sludge, each step more challenging as our shoes grew heavier with the mud enveloping them?  A good creek would have small areas of running water that I could refer to as waterfalls. My daughter, only five, and not knowing any better, would find  that amazing.  I do know better, and I still think they were amazing.  I’d go find one right now and be quite pleased I believe. On the best days, we’d see animal tracks in the mud alongside the creek, tiny fish darting through clear waters.  The sun would shine through the leaf canopy, bouncing polka dots of light off the water.  “God Shines” my daughter used to call those rays of sun when she was attending Catholic school.  In later years, when reminded of that, she would tell us to shut the fuck up. It was a miserable walk home, grit, and mud caking our socks, grinding our heels against our soaking wet shoes.  I don’t remember if we broke down and walked shoeless.  It would have been a risky undertaking, walking along the road towards home, maybe stepping on a wad of gum or broken glass or a used condom. The good thing about returning to our trailer in our filthy state was that it was already pretty shitty.  Gold shag carpet likely installed before I was even born, scarred linoleum in the kitchen.  There was no one to yell at us about tracking mud in the house when we got home. Kim McVicker is a life-long resident of Iowa but has no cows, chickens nor any farming experience. She worked for decades in the financial services industry, which is as dull as it sounds. Mother of one, now gone, she finds solace in writing about her experiences with her daughter, even the ugly memories.  When not reading, writing, or listening to NPR, she enjoys letting her granddaughters squish mud, fingerpaint and otherwise make whatever messes bring them joy.  Her other pieces have been published in a folder labeled Writing on her desktop as well as in HerStry, Pithead Chapel, and forthcoming in BackChannels and Anti-Heroin Chic.  She lives in Des Moines, IA with her delightful, patient and mess-hating husband David.

Within the cocktail of sound, the only thing I hear is a car tyre grinding my bones into a fine powder. To be exhaled by rigid accountants, while my spirit flounders like a shy oracle. They won’t grant me an allowance, but scold me when I ask to wear their skin for just one sultry evening; o’ how they are terrified I will run away with it. Into the night with the silk sarong that keeps their nose in every dandelion pie. Signed and scored by the unguis of Lucifer. Their lacerations are no match for me: I am a thoroughbred, off the latch and wolfing the mint residue of a Grasshopper from the stony cone bowl gifted to me by truth. Courtenay Schembri Gray is the author of four poetry collections, the latest being THE MAGGOT ON MAPLE STREET (Anxiety Press). Her work has appeared in journals such as The Bolton Review and CAROUSEL. She resides in the North of England. Keep up with her on Twitter (@courtenaywrites) / https://themaplemoon.substack.com

CW: Abortion Mornings here are shrouded in mist. It is a soft, golden mist: too cool for Southeast Asia, too hot for the countries kneeling to the Himalayas. The interior teak walls groan, reluctantly awakening from slumber, much like myself. Outside, the improbable city rises from the dust; umber and xanthous and sandy. After a quick breakfast alone watching groups and couples plan their day over limp toast and congealed egg, I shrug on a light cardigan, wrap a bandana around my head, and grab the bike from outside. It’s a rusty old thing, chalky-mint paint peeling from the skeleton. But I paid $2.50 for five days' rent, so I’m not complaining. It has a decent sized basket so I can tuck my daily supplies in it: water, a couple of apples, Lonely Planet. It has no brakes though, so stopping involves either dwindling to a halt or jumping off the seat to plant my feet in the dusty earth. Today, I have no particular destination in mind: I plan to listen to my instincts, to change my usual frenetic pace. To become a human being, not a human doing. # It was not my intention to skulk around Old Bagan to ask the forgiveness of eighty-one dead-eyed stone Buddhas, but here I am, ten in, committed. Kneeling at the feet of number eleven, I marvel at my absurdity. I’m not a Buddhist, or even religiously inclined, but I am riding the swells of grief which are drenching me in a feverish madness. At least I know that I am mad. I am many things but deluded, I am not. "Hello Buddha," I say. This is a small temple and I'm alone, boxed in by stone walls, cold statues. Outside, a hump-backed cow sits sentry by the door: rural security at its finest. I rest a hand on Buddha's knee, close my eyes. "Forgive me. I have fucked up splendidly." It is unrehearsed: I say whatever is bubbling up when I get to each one, and in these silent chambers, self-consciousness stays outside with my protective cow. When I've lingered long enough at this one, I open my eyes, stand, thank him. # They made me pay upfront. I peeled the wad of notes from my wallet, trying not to baulk at the price. The monetary one, anyway. I tried to keep my mouth closed so the frowny receptionists wouldn't notice my blue tongue from late night snacking that I couldn't even clean, with furious toothbrush scraping. "You see," I told my reflection. "You're an incapable mess." She looked back with sad eyes. I sat on a squeaky plastic chair clutching the forms, eyes making a watercolour of the waiting room, while couples drifted in and out. Dr Lin lay me on the bed in a cold consultation room. “There it is,” he said, printed out a photograph and sent me back to the waiting room. They kept the photo on top of my file, where I could see it: a grey grainy little prawn shape against a black hole. # By eleven, my clothes are sticking to my wet skin. There is little shade here between the temples. A few malnourished trees beg fruitlessly for moisture by the roadsides and dirt tracks. I take myself and the bike into New Bagan, flopping into a seat at the nearest open cafe. There is wi-fi here and my phone buzzes intrusively as soon as I connect. Stupid, I curse. You don’t need to look. It starts ringing immediately. I’ve been starved of conversation for days and a tiny strand in me craves human connection. The rest of me wants all humans to disappear and never bother me again. I answer. “Lis? Jesus, where have you been?” Neil. Angry, scared. I picture him sitting in his poky London flat staring at the rolling February smog. It will still be dark, I remind myself. He’s up early. Probably can’t sleep. “It’s been six weeks,” he whispers. “What the hell?” I sigh in response, but can’t find a word, a phrase, that ties together the whirling maelstrom so I say nothing. “Seriously, Lis. It’s not on.” He is still whispering. “Is she there, Neil?” She. Caroline. His fiancee. In just a few short weeks, she’ll be his wife. As long as…well. I suppose he is calling to check that I’m not going to mess that up for him. “Look, I just want a straight answer, Lis. Did you do it?” Did I? # In the temple of Dhammayangyi Pahto, I lay my arm on a cool stone slab, the well cradling my arm intersected by a perfectly straight gash. It is said that King Narathu - who ordered the building of this monument - demanded that the walls be laid with such precision that not even a pin could pass between the bricks. Any mason responsible for a pin-thin breach would have their arm chopped off on this very stone. This proved what an excellent and pious Buddhist he was, in this building constructed to atone for the murders of his father, brother, and wife. I shudder, stand, continue strolling around the temple. There are only a few Buddhas here now, and even if there were more, it's too busy for me to execute my ritual. And walls touched by a cruel man such as Narathu doesn’t really fit with my slightly deranged loving atonement. Outside, a young couple pose in wedding finery for photographs and I think about Neil getting married and his panicked voice on the phone. "Picture, Miss?" A chubby-faced boy is selling sand art on the steps of the temple: lotus flower, dharma wheel. His father helps him, he explains. He's saving for teacher training college. "Good and happy children are very important," he says. I select a picture of a hand in vitarka mudra. "For wisdom. You are a good lady." I'm not. # Buddha twenty-nine sees me calling it a day. The sun is dipping into the horizon and I'm craving a lukewarm shower. I stroke Mr. Twenty-nine's narrow, almost feminine cheek. "Thank you, sir." It's only when I mount the bike that I realise how sore my limbs are, how burnt my shoulders. I'm gritty and grimy all at once and I don't really feel much better. "Maybe tomorrow." My feet push slowly on the pedals, Neil's desperate voice ringing through my head. "I was worried about you, Lis," he'd said. But he wasn't. Isn't. He's worried that his pretty little house of cards might fall. A pathetic part of me that I despise tries to convince me that he does care. The thin, judgemental goat tethered to a post near the hotel knows the truth though. He stares at me with such piercing certainty, a spring bubbles behind my eyes. "Fuck off goat," I say. But really, I mean fuck off Neil, and take any lingering sentiment I have far away. # Holiday romance, he called it. Giddy, exuberant, he left me breathless from the moment we met. Down at Loewy's, they pack them in on a weekend, and it took him three attempts to holler his name over generic house music. We laughed as he misheard ‘Lis’ as 'Geese' and honked at me. He was visiting his cousin, he said, and we laughed some more when we realised that his cousin was Mal, who'd just started working at our place. "Shall we get out of here?" he'd murmured. Neil was funny, erudite and damn sexy. "We shouldn't mention us to Mal," he said. "I don't want to put him in an awkward position." A few weeks later he was flying home. "I'll miss you," we said. And then he was gone. And the following day at work, Mal said,"you know he's getting married in a couple of months?" # Mita is an excellent saleswoman. Under a thatched canopy in the middle of a market stall row, she sells me five woven handbags. Handwoven, she tells me, by enterprising village girls. She could well be spinning a yarn: she might have bought them cheaply wholesale from a Yangon factory, but I choose to believe her. Her daughter, Yunyoo, blinks at me from beneath a roughly hacked fringe, with eyes that say I know what you are. Mita smears a thick disc of yellow paste on each of my cheeks, a stripe down my nose. Thanaka. "For sun," she says. "But also pretty. You find nice Burma man to make you happy." She pauses, mid-daub. "You're not kowaan?" I frown. She taps her belly, points at Yunyoo. "Pregnant? No." She adds a stripe to my forehead. "Okay." From the stall, she plucks a small woven purse. Sanitary towel sized. "For the private things." Yunyoo rolls a coconut across the dirt. # Test again in a month, said Doctor Lin, dismissing me with his busy hand. I misheard him though: anaesthetic, grief. But I heard week. Test again in a week. A week after I returned home, I tested. Positive. My pulse was thudding high in my throat, threatening to leap out of my mouth. Shaking fingers fired off a badly punctuated email to Doctor Lin to which a perfunctory reply pinged back. Month. I said month. No greeting, no inquiry as to my health. Just four sharp words and a brutal dismissal. The thrill I felt at seeing positive, though, told me all I needed to know about what I’ve done. # The last Buddha of my second day is my forty-ninth all up. I show him the blurry photograph I've been carrying in my wallet for the last few weeks, the one I laminated at work after everyone had gone home. "What do you think?" Of course, he doesn't answer, but I imagine if he did, he'd have made some sympathetic remark with a tilted head and gentle smile - he looks the sort. I don’t need to look at the photo as I hold it out to the statues: it is imprinted in my every thought. I run my hands across my belly, grasping for something. At times, I can’t stand, can’t breathe. It sneaks up on me, knocks me off my feet, strangles, yells, punches me. Grief, you are a brutal lover. I've cried a lot today, and it's left me dry. I feel papery and insubstantial:a discarded onion skin, a dead moth-wing. "Can you bring him back as something lovely? A swallow, a kitten?" Him. That's the first time I've done that. "A mother who keeps him safe and warm, please?" Outside, the dark presses in and I consider curling up by Buddha forty-nine, spending the night at his feet. Better still, staying here until I've dried out completely, crumbled, blown away as a blizzard of dust. I stand, drag my arm across my eyes, say goodnight to my latest lama. # "Get out," hissed the receptionist. She jabbed my shoulder with her pen. "You're upsetting the other patients. Go. Sort yourself out." In a blank corridor, I sobbed, debated running. But my bag was still on a chair in the waiting room, and my shoes were underneath. Stupid really: monumental moments decided by a Desigual bag and a pair of $15 Bali-buy Havaianas. My face was studded with pink blotches, and no amount of splashing in the sterile bathroom was helping. Go. Leave. Go for lunch. Go shopping. Go figure stuff out. You are pathetic, said something inside me. It doesn’t deserve to be saddled with you. I can make it work, I told the uninvited voice. I’ll think of something. I…want this You only want to feel okay. You are a selfish waste of space. Go in there, pick up your bag and leave. Walk out. It doesn’t matter. It matters. It doesn’t. I can do it. I can love. You’d be a horrible mother. # In my mouth, the sweet-sour flake dissolves. It is like nothing I’ve ever tasted before, and I’m devastated to learn that after I leave Bagan, I’ll probably never taste them again. Only here, the vendor tells me. Now, I’m armed with two big bags of them, and for the first time in weeks, I am enjoying the process of eating something. “I’ve discovered tamarind flakes,” I tell my first Buddha of the morning. “Quite the revelation. But you already know that, right?” He is Buddha fifty and his left eye has disintegrated, giving me a jocular wink as I present the photo. “Maybe you could bring my boy back as someone from Bagan who grows up eating tamarind flakes.” I’ve decided to name him, my boy. The forum I scrolled last night over dinner said that it can be healing. I’m not sure I deserve to heal, but I’m going to try the name thing nonetheless. Buddha fifty-one has both eyes and looks like a sensible sort, so I show him the photo and try out a few. Hugo? Martin? Richard? Nothing. Benjamin? Ralph? Buddha fifty-one looks on, impassive. “Neil?” I snort. It comes out as a laugh, but turns into a sob. “I know, I’m pathetic.” Daniel. My breath catches in my ribs. That’s the one. Daniel. # I’ve missed you, Daniel, since before they even took you from me. A fat-fingered nurse jabbed my arm with a needle. “Can’t find a vein,” she told Doctor Lin. “Then stop,” I said. “Let me go. I’ve changed my mind.” They stared at me, then the nurse looked to Doctor Lin who nodded for her to continue. “I don’t want to,” I said. I tried to move, but I was strapped by the feet, knees spread. Your picture was in my head, imprinted on the insides of my eyelids when I closed my eyes and tried to forget you. “Please,” I said, but it came out as a whisper, a breath. “Aha,” said the nurse. And then everything started to swim away: the room, the clumsy nurse, the cold eyed doctor. And you, Daniel. You started to swim away. I grasped for you Daniel, please believe me. I fought as hard as I could. No. I should have fought harder. I came around slowly, sluggishly, as if dragged through thick tar. Pale blue curtains separated me from the world. I was on my side on a cold vinyl surface. A bed of sorts, narrow, hard. From beyond the curtain, I heard the sleeping breath of another woman. Did she feel relief? I knew you were gone. I was hollow, empty. As my body started to obey me, I wept. Softly at first, then louder, wilder, abandoned. “Ssshhh,” said a knit-browed nurse. “Hush now.” She patted me on the arm, but she was looking at the soft flutter of the curtain between me and the other woman. “I need to go,” I said through thick lips. “I have to go.” She shrugged. “Free to go whenever you like.” Daniel, it was hard, to push myself to sit, to swing my legs over the bed, to slide my bare feet onto the floor. The nurse helped me to my feet, my legs insubstantial as dandelion stalks to hold the weight of my body and my grief. I took a few tentative steps, a thick pad wadded between my legs. “Go home now,” said the nurse. “Live your life. Forget this ever happened.” # I have the last ten Buddhas to speak to today. I ride to one of the furthest little temples hugging the riverbank that I saw on my way back to the hotel last night. The single stupa rises from a half derelict building that somehow feels reflective of my fractured heart. It is cool inside, as I have come to expect, but there is something else here: a scent. I sniff. It is some sort of oil, faintly herbal, and between the crossed legs of a Buddha, I see a small bowl on legs with a flickering tea light underneath. The temple is empty. I wonder how long it has been burning. Ten Buddha’s line three walls of the temple: four either side of me and two straight ahead. For a moment, I am elated. This is surely some kind of sign, I think. Ten Buddhas, a burning light. I am about to be redeemed. I kneel at each Buddha in turn. Look after him, Buddha. Let Daniel know his mummy loved him. I am not sure what I expect when I arrive at my last Buddha. My eighty-first, my final. Settling in front of him, I cross my legs, rest the photograph in my palm. Eighty-one days, I tell him. Eighty one days, I carried my boy. And then I let him go. I unlock what little reserve I have been holding back and let everything out: the last few months of clutching my little secret to my belly, Neil’s sharp tongue, Doctor Lin’s blank face, the jabs of the needle, the foggy head, the empty space in my centre, the longing, the grief, the regret and the years of a now-impossible future lying ahead. Everything I will not have leaks out: the birthdays, the milestones, the dirty knees, the tears to wipe, the hungry mouth seeking his mother’s nourishment, the warm body sinking into mine. They fall in a cascade, the tears, until there is nothing left to cry. I look up at Buddha eighty-one, my final hope, my last stab at redemption. He stares back, impassive. The candle has gone out. The herbal smell is gone. There is just me gripping a grainy photo in the presence of stone on brick. I’m not sure what I expected: a lightning bolt, a shifting fog, a sense of peace. But it wasn’t this, a dull, empty malaise. Tomorrow, I will travel to Lake Inle, buy a Burmese ruby to commemorate Daniel, look for ways to fill the spaces in me. But now, I bow, thank the Buddhas for listening and climb back onto the dusty bike. I push my feet down on the pedals. I have to keep moving. One, two, one, two. Jay’s work appears in numerous publications, including Unleash Lit, Cerasus and adda. Winner of the Exeter Short Story Prize, Fabula Aestas, Writers Playground and Furious Fiction, she was shortlisted for the 2022 Exeter Novel Prize and the 2023 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Her debut novel Mim and Wiggy’s Grand Adventure was released in July 2023.

This Is Not Another Poem About the Moon The next blue supermoon won’t come until 2037, and by then, we may be gone. Have you thought about that? Once in a blue moon, I would love not to wake up at 3 a.m. worried about mass shootings and wildfires. Once in a blue moon, I would love for you to write me a love poem. It might go something like kiss me / with red lips / under the sunset maple / all aflame. Not that I’ve composed your love poem for me. Not that I thought about it while standing alone in a field, reciting a sonnet to the blue supermoon. Were you looking too? Maybe I wished it had swallowed me. Let me dissolve on its silver tongue. Maybe I’m digesting in the belly of the blue supermoon and these words are reaching you as moon dust. I read it was 17,000 miles closer than average, but looking at it, alone in a field, thinking of you—it felt so far away, you know? At 3 a.m., when everything hurts, I rub the moon’s mint salve all over my body, wondering what’s the point of anything? And then, once in a blue moon, it hits me. This. Winter Landscape No. 3 Someone   glued   cotton   balls  to   gray   construction   paper   and   tried   to   pass it   off  as   the   sky.  Some   days,   I   think   of   you   and   smile,  and   that feels like enough.  But   then   night   brushes   me  with   its   long   fingers   and   I   long to  taste   the   salt   on  your   lips.  I   can   tell   you   everything   here  and   snow will   absorb   the   sound.   I’m   sorry   you’re   the   one   I   love.  I’m   sorry   I’ve let   you   bleed  through   the   center   of   every   poem.  There   are   a  dozen words   for   snow,  but   no   word   for   this   heat   on   my   neck  when   you speak.  No  word  for  how  your   breath   fades   with   my   name  still   in   your throat.  I   want   to   be   as   numb  as   microplastics   in   clouds.  To   land   softly at   your   feet  and   disappear. Fifth Season with thanks to Joe Barca You poured my last good cup of coffee. So hot, and served in a disposable cup because back then you thought climate change could’ve been a hoax and that landfills were lonely. Now my coffee is cold, the earth is burning, and you’re gone. I remember that night in the season we invented to hold us between fall and winter—red in the trees, the two of us like wildflower seed balls rising from snow. We were looking out the window at the lake, out past the headless swan, still somehow singing. The stars were crying, or was that just us, because we were friends but wanted to kiss? What did we see out there, other than a park bench, pigeons, a newspaper floating by? What were we looking for? I want to go back to Venus with you, spin in the opposite direction, back to that chamber we built with desire. My house still smells like that night: light roast coffee, Styrofoam, sandalwood incense. When I look out the window and squint my eyes, it’s you I see on the lake. It’s you I am looking for, and always was. Sarah Mills's poetry has been published or is forthcoming in HAD, Rust & Moth, The Shore, SoFloPoJo, Beaver Mag, MoonPark Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, Ballast, Miniskirt Mag, Thimble, and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. You can visit her at sarahmillswrites.com.

He drives the coast road as if it were a motorway. I hold my breath as the car careens around bends, praying we don’t meet a tractor, or worse, veer left and end up in the salt water. Sheep graze in small fields to our right, hemmed in by low, stone walls. The sun is trying to come out between the clouds. Even that manoeuvre seems tricky. I think of past trips to this hotel, some before I’d even met him. A December wedding, frost thick on the ground, a lethal totter in high heels. A birthday afternoon tea, all crustless sandwiches and tasteless gossip. A Confirmation celebration of in-laws and out-laws, complete with pastel-coloured cake, the icing sickly sweet. Our ration of words for the day has been used up. It would be preferable to send emojis – monkey with his head in his paws, exploding/smoking brain, sad face with one tear. Our car struggles up the hill to the parking area. We get out, stretch our limbs, and inhale the sea air. He hauls our overnight bags from the boot. We tug them along, the wheels clattering on tarmac. There’s a queue at reception.  When it’s finally our turn, the girl at the desk chats away, as if she went to school with us, and hands over the swipe card. In the deluxe bedroom, there is still silence between us. As he unpacks his bag and hangs his clothes, I’m half expecting the red, silky dress to slip out between his jeans and snazzy dinner jacket. And now that I conjure up that garment again, I cannot un-see it. He gazes out at the ocean, as foam spills up onto the road. ‘Happy anniversary,’ he says. Geraldine McCarthy lives in West Cork. She writes flash fiction, short stories and poems. Geansaithe Móra (Baggy Jumpers), her flash fiction collection, is published by LeabhairCOMHAR.

My cousin told me a story about her parents. They met in kindergarten in New Jersey. My Uncle spotted a blonde girl sitting in the next row, two seats ahead. As my cousin told me about this, I imagined the girl’s hair in braids, sitting up stiffly in her chair. This was because when she was old, she consistently maintained perfect posture. My Uncle Dudley—yes, that was his name—was just begging for a whack on the hand for slouching, with his brunette hair a chaotic mess of a bowl cut. When the teacher’s ruler responded to his supposed insolence and swung down with a Catholic thwack, the girl turned to Dudley with tears in her eyes. Later that day, Uncle Dudley approached her, blurting out, “Someday, I will marry you.” After the end of the school year, the girl moved to New Jersey. According to Aunt Vivian and Uncle Dudley, the following years passed long and complexly. Those times were rough on Dudley’s family. They moved eight times in nine years, partly because it was often impossible to keep up with the rent on income from the gas station my grandfather ran in Hackensack, New Jersey, during the Great Depression. In the summer before junior year, the family moved once again. Again, a new high school. On the first day, Dudley and Vivian (who turned out to be the blonde girl from kindergarten) ran into each other in the hallway leading to the school entrance. Three years later, carrying their ragged and stained engagement portrait in his pocket, Dudley was fighting off banzai charges in the punchbowl of Bougainville. *** October is the first storm from the Canadian north, leaves falling like ripples at low tide, high school football under the Friday night arc lights as competing marching bands blare, blast, and drum staccato from the stands. But what really sticks as your memory travels from teenage morning until the night of old age is the first girl you fell in love with. She is more than just the first—the person you knew from the first gaze was the One. Kim Wickham is known for wearing eccentric outfits at her cashier job at the Winns on West 34th Street. This particular day, she dressed as an Apache dancer: black beret, red striped cotton pullover, and a mid-length black A-line skirt. Kim is considered a weirdo, even by the freaks at school. Earlier in the day, on the way to third period English, Kim was called out in the hallway as being a cute culty Christian. “Actually,” Kim responded, “I’m a witch.” Then, went into the classroom, third seat, the last row. Next to me. I think she was a rebel against the rebels, which I found appealing. Leaning against the counter, I told her that. “Makes sense to me,” Kim said while rolling complicated multi-patterned fabric. “There was something I read about fashion expressing individuality,” she said. “If outward appearances matter, make the most without turning it into a uniform.” She paused with an enigmatic smile, adding. “But it is true. I am a witch. However, not just yet, really. I’m learning, though.” “I’ll tell you more later.” *** I learned a lot from Kim. In the following week, monarch butterflies followed her before they migrated. Occasionally, she would hold out her left hand, and a butterfly would settle on her finger. We took walks through the neighborhood. Both of us had single mothers and barely knew our fathers. We looked forward to next quarter and taking Drivers Ed. We desperately wanted to learn to drive and be free to leave when we could and go farther without taking the Northcross Mall bus. Sometimes, Kim wore an ankh around her neck. Other times, a pentagram. A teacher demanded she take it off. Instead, Kim pushed it under her black turtleneck. I asked her if this made her mad. “I am mad, but things have a way of working themselves out.” The teacher was gone the next quarter. She failed an English competency exam and was immediately dismissed. I tell her. Kim responds with a look denoting this was how things work themselves out. *** During the winter, Kim taught me Tarot, keeping it simple by reading a three-card spread. Explained how to build my intuition and work on developing my subconscious. We discussed dreams and their meaning. She told me about the vital nature archetypes and gave me books to read that often were hard to understand, but she made a point to ask questions. Kim does spells but remains secretive. I’ll save that for the future, she said. She showed me her simple bedroom altar: two candles in sleek candlesticks on a black cloth. Sewn on the fabric was an interlaced unicursal hexagram with a small flower at its center. I already knew about Aleister Crowley and Thelema. I had just finished reading The Book of the Law. Afterward, she handed me another book by him. Moonchild. *** After Spring quarter dismissal, Kim and I climbed the cliff and ran across the Expressway. I followed behind her, entranced by the flow of her long peasant skirt and the skip-hop sounds of well-worn leather sandals. Outside Spellmans, we bummed a ride from a junior we knew well enough to take us to the public library. Instead of going in, we walked to the park across the street and stretched out on the grass near the gazebo. Staring into the sky, I sensed that the park was shaped like a punchbowl—the same as Bougainville. Kim climbed over me and intertwined her fingers with mine. “Okay, I trust you now. We share a creative alchemy.” She leaned in closer. I stared into her wolfish eyes, my gaze tracing the lines of her chin, lips, the arch of her eyebrows, and the braids against the sides of my face. I thought about Uncle Dudley in kindergarten. “Solstice is next month,” Kim said. Her grip tightened. “Then.” Mike Lee is a writer and editor at a trade union in New York City. His work appears in or is forthcoming in Roi Fainéant, Drunk Monkeys, The Opiate, Fictionette, Brilliant Flash Fiction, BULL, and many others. His story collection, The Northern Line, is available on Amazon.

Finished in Dreams Deduction of the general from the specific is no longer needed, the evidence is in— The ice caps are melting, oceans rising, refugees on the move. How many wails for the earth slide out in the lowlands until even the most self-made individual will raise their eyes, hazed at first, to receive the news as it arrives and arrives. We remember the way it used to be, all those drives across country while we said we’d do what we want, when we want, touting our freedom, we even shot fireworks. That turned out to be a waste. So no more puffing ourselves up, no more crazy weekends on the coast, we’ve got to live smaller, become less. And you know what? The work still gets finished in dreams. Hamlet In A Climate Silly boy, at first a character in Shakespeare’s mind, that he puts on a page, then on a stage, who’s wondering if he should be or not, portrayed over and over in varied climes each allowing the slightest nuance of a word, that later becomes a major theme, it takes over the play. I write these words as I react to heat, cold, wind. Aren’t I one person in one context then unrecognizable in another, the way I get handsy with you after the sun goes down, and wake in the night, looking into blackness for a sign. . . So, like Hamlet, I’ll go on from here into the next clime, feeling my way into the firmament, remembering that what I carry is everything I’ll know. A Globe My story seemed as fulsome as real time could make it. I saw storm fronts arrive bringing wind shifts on the flats. I heard rustling in dark corners that I tried to enlighten, enliven. There were conversations that I couldn’t forget, and now they’ve grown gargantuan, I listened, I heard. And the voice of Miley Cyrus wafted the hall: was it a moan? Why did her loss of love matter so much? Maybe she projected herself in the melody, wanted to become a moral or two. Which is what we try to make of ourselves, don’t we? And when the lawyers arrived, I felt like a soldier in a portrait of Waterloo: so much to be comprehended, all that running into the breach, some salutations offered, then the breaths die away. Luckily, there were survivors, or did I make that up too? Wasn’t there a stenographer who made a record so later we could examine the wreckage, offer our critiques. Those lines we shot across the conference room were a sad cover for our grief that flooded the place. At the end of the day, we just left. Yet, once outside we confronted surrounding heat, swelling the air like a harsh idea filling the earth, and despite pillow talk or the private speech I heard in my head, I never tried to stop it, at least not much, not then. And whether I ran the silly streets or took leave to the coast, I couldn’t escape it. For surprise, on this planet, everything is connected to everything. So, buckle up, strap on the strap on, we live on a globe. Stories in Smoke As though in Bosch’s Descent Into Hell he swans the lowlands swamped by smoke from fires on the coast, the temp on his car AC turned down as the heat heats up, unaware that the climate is taking his measure. The radio bursts with Winona: why did her entanglement with a man cause her to wail so much? I mean, she’s a star? Doesn’t she have it all, the cars, the place with a pool, receive texts from exotic venues, or does she struggle like the rest of us. We go on, try to be happy, as we further make our descent. Once the meeting Tee’s up, I feel like one of Napoleon’s soldiers looking from the trench, barbs lobbed across the table, glaring looks given, wondering how it came to this or that, and how my children, one who asks do you love me, one saying of course you love me, and one who doesn’t give a rats ass if I love them or not, could clear the air, and you know what, even if I tried or thought about it, or wanted to, I couldn’t keep people from driving around, or prevent the population from swelling. I went to sleep to the sound of traffic, meaning we shouldered through brambles, we made the brambles. We did not give up no matter how complicated the ornery kerfuffle. So hold on to your undies. We are still on our own. We are on the loose. Taking Stock She looks from her door. Hadn’t she thought by now she’d have found a cure for some loathsome disease, written a compelling oeuvre, found a way to save the planet from us. From here she’ll turn back to her desk, find the email she was writing, focus on it, be as granular as she can. The lights will burn brighter as dusk comes on. Parked cars will remain where they are. Meetings will drone on. Still, from inside she’ll hear music, it will be like wind blowing in tall grass, it will be just like that. Cottingham has published poems and reviews of poetry collections in many journals, including Prairie Schooner, Ashville Poetry Review and Rain Taxi. He is a Pushcart Nominee, a Best of Net Nominee, the winner of the 2019 New Millennium Award for Poem of the Year and was a finalist in the 2022 Great Midwest Poetry Contest. His debut volume of poems Midwest Hymns, launched in April, 2023. It is a finalist in the 2023 Best Book Awards for Poetry. He lives in Edmond, Oklahoma.

sitting poolside at a Dominican resort an older couple guessing mid-80’s shuffles by my wife turns to me and asks will that be us someday? I tell her No she’s hurt by my answer mid-forties is painful doubling it sounds awful I explain that I simply no longer desire a long life a good one will suffice Jason Melvin writes words. He puts Doritos on ham sandwiches. To read those words, visit jasonmelvinwords.weebly.com.  Make your own sandwich.

Check-in was smooth, baggage drop easy. The absence of belts, buckles, coins and earrings meant she cleared security having expended a fraction of the psychological effort she’d set aside for the task. It was a good start. But, in the buffed marble and strip lights of the terminal building, she was stopped short by the idea that it had all been too simple, that although nothing so far hinted at the potential horror to come, there would still be a price to pay, and that days that started as well as this could just as easily end as badly as her imagination would allow. The ledger of life would have to be squared and tallied, her universe brought back into balance. She was scared of flying. Illogical, she knew. Flying was the safest form of transport; statistically, empirically, anecdotally. Planes didn’t just fall out of the sky. No, she thought. They never made it off the runway. When they did, they ran out of fuel and glided serenely into housing estates. They got lost in fog. Engines were wrecked by whooper swans at thirty thousand feet. Crews forgot or never knew which flashing warning lights meant what. Captains fell asleep. First Officers were still leafing through instruction manuals when the fuselage hit the tree-line, or belly-flopped down a motorway in a shower of sparks. It wasn’t incorrect to say that flying was the safest form of transport, she thought, but it was disingenuous. Walking was much safer. No-one had ever walked into the side of a mountain and exploded. They may have fallen off one, but that was something different altogether. She bought a magazine. She tried to think about something else. She couldn’t. She resorted to logic. Apples and oranges. She wasn’t comparing like for like. Safety was a calculation based on distance travelled versus frequency of incident. Flying was safer than walking because you couldn’t walk as far as you could fly. Although you could. And the further you walked, the greater the chance of an accident. But the accident would be the result of external forces, not something intrinsic to the act of walking itself. You might get run over. You might freeze in a mountain pass. But walking in and of itself wouldn’t kill you. Aviophobia. The fear of flying. The big one. The last to overcome. All others had been skirmishes in the foothills; small victories and easy wins, picked off and banked before the final assault. Tactics. Name her fear. Seek it out. Engage. Emerge stronger. And when the going got tough, keep going. And think of something else in order to get through. She bought a cup of coffee. She drank it. She went to the toilet. Arachnophobia – spiders. Ophidiophobia – snakes. Close cousins in terror. A one-on-one in the flat with Rocco from Collette’s Jungle Party Experience had gone a long way to seeing off both. “You’d be surprised how often we do this,” Rocco had told her. It was a Tuesday afternoon. Collette was his sister. It had been her day off. “She’s having a break,” he confided. “From the children, not the animals. “Avoid Pinner,” he warned. A bristly tarantula formed a black and orange epaulette on his shoulder. He cradled a four-foot Royal python in his arms like a sleeping puppy. He angled his spider-shoulder forward. “Pick it up,” he said. “Go on.” She had. “The Colombian red-leg,” Rocco announced. “Aggressive, but not particularly venomous.” She felt her heart race, her skin cool and wrinkle at the thought of what she was doing. She focused on the frame of the living room window, wondering how much it might cost to get stripped and re-painted, what value doing so would add to the flat, whether or not she should sell the flat, and where she would move to if she did. The Colombian red-leg scampered weightlessly from her palm to her elbow, from her elbow to her shoulder, and back to her palm. “We used to have two,” said Rocco, devotedly stroking the tiny dome of the spider’s head. “But … Pinner.” Seemingly exhausted, the red-leg padded gratefully onto the back of his hand. He shrugged the python towards her. “Touch it,” he urged. “It’s not slimy.” It wasn’t. The snake’s body arched upwards as if welcoming her attention. Silently running through a list of direct debits and standing orders, she accepted it into her arms. Softly, she held it, respectful of its weight and power. After a minute, it flexed and began circling back towards the comfort of Rocco’s chest. As it left her arms, its head hovered briefly in mid-air. Rocco leaned forward and kissed it gently on the snout. “Don’t tell Collette I did that.” Spiders. Snakes. Easy. Acrophobia. Heights. She’d booked excursions to five-hundred-plus-foot seafront observation towers in Portsmouth and Brighton. Rehearsing recipes for vegan lasagne, and chicken on the bone with paprika and green peppers, she’d ridden to the top, and made herself look down onto the cities below; the roads and houses, the lead and asphalt roofs of office blocks, the heaving sea and the narrow, white backs of gulls gliding beneath her feet, identical in either location. When her eyes swam and her head turned heavy, she’d made herself keep looking, calculating portion sizes and cooking times in order to reach the other side of the feeling. When the sensation had passed, she’d quietly punched the air. Heights. Piece. Of. Piss. Of course, she’d told herself, that had been low-hanging fruit. More abstract fears would be a different challenge. Atychiphobia; the fear of failure, which she had had to work hard to define and defuse. Being specific helped. Degree? She had one. Career? She earned a living. Relationship? Robert had turned out to be a prat. In fact, finding that out had been a significant success. Failure, she’d decided, was an external construct, a function of other people’s minds. The trick was to stop it from getting into hers. Allegrophobia. Being late.  For what, she decided to tell herself? She resolved to live in the moment and let whatever happened, happen, when it did, whether she was in time to see it or not. Getting to that point had required focus and dedication, but that was what she was good at, allowing her to loop back to failure, to the concept of which she administered another, thorough kicking. Other fears she’d approached philosophically. Coulrophobia. Equinophobia. She’d been kind to herself about clowns and horses, giving herself permission to avoid them both. Clowns on horses were unlikely, she had decided. If she saw a clown on a horse, she’d emigrate. Aviophobia. The fear of flying. Why she was here, roaming departures before she embarked on a nine-hour journey she thought would either cure her or dissolve her mind forever. She passed a sushi bar, a pub chain outlet, bureaux de changes, signs for airline service desks. The multi-faith prayer room was closed. Flying. Statistically, it was safer than driving. She wasn’t disputing that. But that was because there were several tens of thousands of times as many cars on the road than there were planes in the sky. And yes, she realised her ratios were screwy, that the aircraft she was counting only belonged to commercial fleets, like the one she was making herself travel with later that day, and that the cars she was counting were all cars, everywhere, belonging to and being driven by anyone. Also, cars drove on roads, often into each other. Planes flew in the seemingly infinite sky. The safety record of a billion-and-a-half cars, being driven by at least that many people, in the crowded constraints of what was effectively two dimensions, could not be compared to that of thirty-five thousand aircraft, with windows and radios and lights, being flown by crews of professionals adhering to pre-agreed protocols, in the vast, three-dimensional expanse of the air. And still, planes managed to crash. She bought herself breakfast. The garish, manic café she chose promised an average wait time of twelve minutes between order and food. She wondered why. If you were in that much of a hurry, would you really order a meal? Peeved and unnerved, she thought about punishing the irrelevance of the claim by taking her custom elsewhere. But she was hungry, and something related to but not quite about her adopted mantra of living life in the moment meant she felt obliged to stay. She was also at the front of the queue to be seated. When her food arrived, after a wait of twenty minutes which seemed to prove a point, she treated herself to a bout of nit-picking to calm her anxiety. The coffee was lukewarm. When the sausages were cooked was anyone’s guess. The baked beans had sought safety by fusing themselves together. The scattering of flash-fried mini croutons was pointlessly difficult to eat. The meal as a whole had the appearance of having been assembled some time ago, to a pre-ordained, pre-approved pattern ticked off by a focus group, and stored somewhere hot, but not quite hot enough. Why the staff had taken twenty minutes to bring it to her table was a mystery. Perhaps they were waiting for the coffee to cool down. She laughed out loud at her own joke. “Everything OK?” The waitress was at her table. “Lovely, thank you.” She left a tip. Generosity felt like a tribute to a higher power. Rounding up her bill was buying luck. She felt better. She went to the toilet again. She bought an ironic Toblerone. She told herself that if – when - she got on the plane, she would steal a pillow, some branded headphones, or a copy of the laminated safety card to prove she’d actually taken off. She would keep it in a drawer in the kitchen and look at it whenever she questioned her resilience. Wait. What kind of idiot was she? Of course she couldn’t steal the laminated safety card. What could invite disaster more effectively than planning to steal the aircraft’s laminated safety card? If she’d wanted to tempt fate, could she have done it any more effectively? She set about making amends, She took the escalator to the lower concourse and pushed a ten-pound note through the Perspex dome of the charity collection point. If she ever got on the plane – and suddenly it wasn’t at all clear that she would - she would put a similar amount in the little good causes envelope she’d find in the netted pouch of the seat in front of her. She’d recycle properly. She’d sponsor a goat. She bought herself a coffee. She sat in an empty row of moulded plastic seats in front of the towering glass wall of the departure hall. Her head spun. Her ears felt hot. She began to search for something to occupy her mind. Outside, she could see a low, flat, yellow vehicle, pushing aircraft from one part of the terminal apron to another. Its dimensions, its rectangular flatness, made her think of a very large paperback book on wheels. The way it moved, slowly, humbly, reminded her of a tugboat guiding bigger, more glamorous vessels in and out of port. A road-tug, she decided, although its tiny wheels and proximity to the ground meant the perfect level of the runway apron was possibly the only surface it could actually operate on. For a few minutes, she couldn’t work out how the thing was finding its way from one aircraft to another. Then she realised it was being operated remotely by men in orange hi-visibility jackets. One walked behind with a hand-held controller the size of a shoe box. The other walked in front, beckoning the yellow vehicle towards him like a compliant farm animal. When it successfully docked with the front wheel of a parked aircraft, he clapped. When it began to pull the aircraft towards a stand, he clapped some more. The man’s enthusiasm made her wonder about his relationship with the machine, whether he worked with it every day and understood its strengths and idiosyncrasies. He would have given it a name, she decided – something wry perhaps, like Steve - and secretly begun to look forward to seeing it each morning. She imagined how sad he would be when Steve began to wear out or was replaced by a more advanced model. She wondered if he would have decided to retire at the same time and take Steve home with him like a superannuated police Alsatian. She wondered if the bond between them would begin to fray once the man fully understood the commitment he’d made. Assuming Steve was electric, would re-charging him all night in the garage prove ruinously expensive? Would he lose patience when Steve became stranded on speed humps? When Steve malfunctioned, would he attempt to mend it himself? Would he make a mess of it? And would his wife gently tell him he’d done everything he could, and suggest it was time to let Steve go? If that happened, how would he get Steve to the dump? She drank her coffee. She acknowledged the sheer size and internal volume of the departures hall; its light and structure, the mammoth steel columns, the giant bolts and washers that reminded her of ocean-going anchor chains; the arrogant waste of opportunity represented by an eighty-foot gap between the uppermost level of usable floor-space and the curving steel roof, filled with nothing except warm air and sparrows. What was paint, she wondered, looking at how much of it had been used to colour the icy white interior of the cavernous hall. Water, obviously, but what else? Where did its ingredients come from, and what were the costs to nature of extracting them? She was sure it couldn’t be recycled. What if the contractors had ordered too much? Was the workforce entitled to what was left over? Would they want it? Did hundreds of houses in this part of southeast England boast the same polar white interiors? Would frequent-flyers invited to Sunday lunch be suddenly triggered, and find themselves rifling pockets for boarding passes to present to their puzzled hosts? She sat back in her plastic chair. Spooling, internal voyages like these made her calm. She made her way to the departure gate. On the way, she was overtaken by a cluster of men and women in distinct uniforms; blazers, pencil skirts, cream blouses; white shirts, tapered grey trousers and waistcoats; ties, ascots in airline livery; dark, fitted suits, peaked caps; briefcases, overnight bags on wheels. The flight crew. The cabin crew. Something about them reassured her; their air of confidence but lack of complacency; the care they took over their appearance; the way they walked in lockstep. It was going to be OK. Instantly, unchangeably, she knew it. She would fly today. She would vanquish her fear. She would take her seat on the plane. She would watch the safety demonstration and absorb the laminated safety card. The aircraft would taxi into position on the runway, pause, then accelerate to the point at which it lifted smoothly into the air. The light green and grey fields would unfurl below them. A red-brick farmhouse would reveal itself in the fold of a hill. The aircraft would break cloud cover and she would see the sun reflected off the sheer white of the elegant wing outside her window, its sturdy rivets, its rakishly upturned tip. With the cabin crew’s permission, she would unbuckle her seatbelt and order a gin and tonic, the first sip of which she would take as they crossed the English Channel, the last drop of which she would tip into her mouth as they cleared the Belgian Ardennes on their way south and east. Twice, there would be turbulence; once over the Tirol and again just past Pristina. The plane would shake and judder, but the passengers would laugh, and whoop and clap the biggest dips and rolls. Someone would shout, “Again! Again!” and everyone would laugh. “That was what we call ‘clean-air turbulence’,” the captain would advise over the intercom. He would speak almost melodically, in an accent she would ponder for several minutes, and eventually place somewhere in south Wales. “Basically wind-shear off the Alps and the Sar mountains.” Penarth, Pontypridd, Pontypool. Somewhere thereabouts, she would decide, triangulating. Although she wouldn’t see it, she would imagine the flight crew behind the cock-pit’s locked door; giggling, shaking heads, dabbing at uniforms with scented wet wipes. “What are we like?” the First Officer would snort, remarking on the idiocy of opening a flask of soup after – after – being specifically warned by air traffic control of bumpy patches ahead. “Us! Of all people!” he would opine, to gales of laughter. “I mean … really!” She would think about falling asleep, but before being able to, a tiny girl in a plum, crew-neck cardigan would escape her parents and stand next to her in the cabin aisle, her minuscule hand on the armrest of her seat. The child would stare and smile. She would smile back. The child’s father would join them, full of doting exasperation, making a point of rolling his eyes. “I see you’ve made a friend,” he would observe, looking at her, not his daughter. “Is she being a nuisance?” “Not at all,” she would reply. An hour later the child would be back, solemnly handing over her father’s mobile phone. Chuckling, he would come and retrieve it. She would watch two films; one she hadn’t seen but thought she should, and another she had, but thought she’d like to see again. The first would make no sense but prove hugely enjoyable. The second, infused with significance by speed, altitude, and just the right amount of alcohol, would this time make more sense than anything she had ever watched before, and in some way change her life. Hours later, nestling in the debris of long haul, she would pull the complimentary synthetic airline blanket around her shoulders and sleep, seatbelt fastened and visible for the benefit of the cabin crew. Shortly before landing, and without waking her up, someone would gently raise her seat to the upright position and tuck her in. She would open her eyes as the aircraft jolted onto the runway at their destination, exactly on time. Her fears would have been proved irrational. Her misgivings conquered forever. Or, the plane would have barely penetrated the first band of wispy cloud before it began to violently pitch and yaw. As it did, she would sadly acknowledge that her primary instinct about air travel had been correct; statistically, flying was the safest form of travel, but on a personal level, it only had to go wrong once. Mystery red light in the cock-pit. Canada goose in the starboard air intake. No one would scream. No urgent alarm would pulse through the cabin, underscoring imminent disaster. Whatever happened would happen very quickly and be over before anyone had realised it had begun. Except, perhaps, the more experienced or observant members of the crew. Except, of course, her. Basophobia. Fear of falling. Thanatophobia. Fear of dying. As the aircraft began to corkscrew downwards, she would sigh. “Obviously …“ she would whisper to herself, allowing that thought to run into the next: something around the question of who would clear up the wreckage and how it would eventually be disposed of. Those sorts of things didn’t happen by themselves.

It was raining when I gutted the shed, crystal balls swinging from spider’s webs long vacated, crusty arachnid shells punctuating graves within a woodworm’s gable house. The vintage scent kissed me first. Denial. And sap and dust and all the years my father haunted here, every surface smoothed, soothed by the meat of his tender hands, short nails, split finger screws. Everything was in boxes. Neat. Unlike the nook he’d filled at home, paper-strewn, feet up every time mother vacuumed his crumbs away. Glue had set in rudimentary containers: washing up bottles, label-scarred jam jars, thimbles. It was as if he had wanted to bring a handful of mundanity in with him,                 as if he inhabited a space shuttle rather than a box in the garden. I felt his distance now. There was a peg on the back of the door. A worn, green apron hanging on    I died a little when I found an old smile in the pocket. Mother said to donate it. Why was there no warning? With a warning, I might have coped. If only he had hung a sign on the door to inform me that do not disturb would be forever. And I was disturbing. Rummaging. Grave robbing. But it all had to go, a life in boxes. Neat. He would have appreciated that. Green bottles, an assortment of screws, washers, bolts, I sifted them through my fingers like flour and butter. I could not make in the way he made, create in the way he created. Grey-bearded Santa Claus with hints of a child’s God. I did not wish to judge the things he’d left half sanded, unfinished, joints jutting out like the bones of a leg. Everything reminded me of him, and the world was weeping but not inside, as he had felted the roof last month. I was not felted or prepared for winter. For once, there was a doll his tape could not fix, a wire could not hold straight, or a hammer lovingly tap back into shape. Broken. Tell no one, but I piled dusty shavings onto the vice. In desperate communion, it became his hair and stubborn old head. He had to fix the guttering. The broken rungs of his ladder jutting out like the bones of a leg. I pressed myself against the block of wood still clamped within. I imagined his arms around me one last time. He told me I was the best thing he ever made. Zoe Davis is an emerging writer and artist from Sheffield, England. A Quality Engineer in advanced manufacturing by day, she spends her evenings and weekends writing poetry and prose, and especially enjoys exploring the interaction between the fantastical and the mundane, with a deeply personal edge to her work. You can find her words in publications such as: Acropolis Journal, Livina Press, CERASUS Magazine, Full House Literary and The Poetry Bus. You can also follow her on X @MeanerHarker where she's always happy to have a virtual coffee and a chat.

Sunday at the Farmer’s Market Once upon a long time ago, Helena wore low heels, but now even orthopedic sneakers don’t keep her feet from hurting hours before the end of a school day. She tracks children’s tears, vomit, spilt milk, loose teeth, and the frequency of peanut appearances in her nut-free kindergarten classroom. These days, her kids look like fresh copies of the old Polaroids hanging on her “Math Facts” Wall of Fame. Sally C’s little girl looks so much like her mom that Helena never quite remembers her name and since she refuses to call students sweetie or honey, she didn’t call her anything at all for three weeks, which was the time it took to start making them practice penmanship by printing new name tags every day. Kindergarteners need all the practice they can get. Retired, Helena could sit at this park bench and watch children play without worrying about arguments over plastic dinosaurs. (She’d worry. But, retired, Helena wouldn’t be responsible.) Instead of listening to endless iterations of how Sam caught the biggest fish ever or that Lulu’s pet tortoise almost died five times, she would be able to hear herself think. She would hear herself think. She would hear herself think. A fly circles and threatens to land on Helena’s orange juice, but she waves it away, a lesson plan for insects and adjectives hatching in her mind. Flies: tenacious, unsuccessful and, ultimately, short-lived. RSVP If this town were bigger and the mail carriers didn’t know everyone’s name (and dog’s name and the possible name of their unborn children) and take pride in knowing what was in the mail from locals so they’d know an invitation when they saw it and be delighted that it was going through the system with a legitimate stamp instead of just being walked over, unaddressed, and tossed on a porch or delivered verbally at a run-in at the market because you can’t not run into people in a town where a family moving in or out would require numbers to be repainted on the city sign and an announcement to be made in the flyer that went out every week with local news that covered everything from how Timmy’s latest lost tooth got an extra five dollars from the tooth fairy to a request for nobody to plant squash this year because Ms. Bea had overdone her garden again and odds were squash would end up in the wedding dinner for the person you should have been brave enough to say yes to before an outsider came and swooped them away and everyone knows so even though you wish you didn’t have to go, there’s no way they’d believe you if you said the invitation never arrived. Amy Marques has been known to call books friends and is on a first name basis with many fictional characters. She has been nominated for multiple awards and has visual art, poetry, and prose published in journals such as Streetcake Magazine, South Florida Poetry Journal, MoonPark Review, Bending Genres, Ghost Parachute, Chicago Quarterly Review, and Gone Lawn. More at https://amybookwhisperer.wordpress.com.

I attended mass with my son. His first time, my second. My first time was my boyfriend’s niece’s first communion. My boyfriend said the sanctuary might spontaneously combust when I walked in. I wasn’t sure which way his meaning went, but he, a former Catholic school boy, seemed pleased I was religion-averse. Now, we’re married, and this mass was my sister-in-law’s funeral. I loaded my son with too many instructions, more for my benefit than his. I’m an ex-Fundamentalist. Decades have passed since I was a churchgoer, but I’ll always be recovering. Catholicism, with its ancient rituals and international hierarchies, intimidates me. I grew up with dunking baptisms and 20-something year old elders, like my father once was, gatekeeping the path to heaven. Catholics used profanity and drank and smoked and would not make it through the gates, I was told. I instructed my son: We’re not Catholic, so we’re not allowed to touch the holy water. Don’t touch the stack of anti-abortion pamphlets. Really, let’s not touch anything. Stand when everyone stands, sit when they sit, kneel if they kneel. We don’t need to sing. We won’t know the words. We have to sit at the front, but we can’t go up for the crackers. It’s going to look like juice, but it’s not going to be juice. I followed the program with my finger so he could see how much longer it would be. We stood and sat and no one kneeled. I tried to observe as someone who’d never been in a church, to see what my son might see. The sanctuary was adorned with art depicting torture, a stabbing, blood, a dead man: things I wouldn’t let him watch on TV. The priest: a man with whom I  would never leave him alone. The priest dipped a brush in holy water and flung it across the coffin. My son nudged me, a panicked whisper: Some got on my hand. He showed me a drop on his thumb. That’s ok, I said. But I didn’t wipe it away with my own hand. The altar boys’ hands shook as they filled the thurible and lit the flame. Flame: something else we don’t let him touch. The youngest, just a few years older than my son, was about the age I was when I chose to be baptized. The youth pastor pushed me under so fast I didn’t have time to hold my breath. When I emerged, choking, water slipping from my body, I felt a change spread through me. I felt clean, stripped of the filth I blamed myself for. I didn’t tell anyone what I felt, because it confirmed I needed to be forgiven, it proved I was dirty and needed to be cleansed. It proved I wouldn’t make it through the gates my father helped guard because of the very things he had done to me. There are things they have in common, my former religion and this one. My father: another man of god I would never leave my son alone with. Later, I asked him what he thought of mass. He was sad he hadn’t had a chance to get to know his aunt before she died, but he thought the art was interesting. Stephanie Frazee's work is forthcoming from Bayou Magazine, The Evergreen Review, and Door Is A Jar, and her work has appeared in ONE ART, Third Wednesday, Juked, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere.